Cinema: Passion in Hellas

Phaedra proves a number of things: that Jules Dassin knows how to direct
a movie; that antique Greek tragedy can be done as modern cinema
brilliantly and meaningfully; that Melina Mercouri is as achingly
believable as a tragedienne as she was believably zany as a comedienne
(in Never on Sunday); and that Tony Perkins had better go back to
making thrillers for Hitchcock.

Taking a classic myth that had been dramatized already by Euripides,
Seneca and Racine, Dassin and Margerita Liberaki have fashioned a new
Phaedra that is honest, beautiful and quite terrifying. Mercouri, as
Phaedra, is the second wife of an...